Do You Know How AIDS is different from HIV?

Even though people may talk about HIV and AIDS like they are one and the same, they are not the same thing. HIV is the virus that infects a person. AIDS is the disease that later develops in people with HIV. Today, drugs make it possible for people with HIV infection to live a very long time before ever getting AIDS. How long you have the HIV infection before developing AIDS depends on a few things. Some of these things you can control, like taking your medicine on time every day. There are other things you can’t control, like the kind of HIV (called the “strain”) that you have.
Only a doctor can diagnose AIDS. It is not a diagnosis you can make yourself. You have developed AIDS if you already have HIV and:

You have an AIDS-defining condition, which is an illness that is very unusual in someone not infected with HIV. You can read about some of these conditions in the section on opportunistic infections (OIs).